Not a good night

It was not a good night on The Quest. I fell victim to my old demon of seriously overplaying TP with a good kicker. In this case, it was against someone who inexplicably thought Q3s was worth calling a 4BB raise with ("But they were sooted..."), but the blame ultimately falls to me not listening to what his bets were telling me.

The result on another table was also not so good, but I fought back on that one to make it back to almost even. Combined with small positive results on a couple other tables it left me down a wee bit over a buy-in for the night.

Yesterday I got email from PokerPages about some new tournament software they're beta testing. If I remember correctly, a couple years ago I participated in a heads-up challenge that used something available through PokerPages to allow us to play heads-up tournaments for free. I honestly haven't paid any attention to it since then. The email said they were giving away free money as part of the beta test so I took a look.

After installing the software and signing up, they gave me T$1000 to enter tournaments. Allegedly you can get topped back up to T$1000 any time you drop below. I don't know what the deal is going to be long term, but it looks like they're setting up some kind of subscription thing. I gather this is to avoid it being an actual gambling site. They'll just have competitions among their members and award small prizes out of the subscription fees. At least that's my guess. For the beta they gave me a free weekly subscription. Not sure at this point if it will expire at the end of the week or if it will renew.

Last night I played a T$100 tournament. Winner got something like $32 plus a bunch of T$. T$10,000 starting chips, 50/100 blinds at level 1, ten minute levels. Only 55 runners. It looked like it should be easy. That was before I saw my cards. They went from bad to worse to could-it-get-any-uglier. And the play was even slower than on the Stars ring tables where everyone but me is a MMIA thinking they're cool because they can hold up play on 20 tables at once. I made a stab at a bluff that cost me a lot more than it should have. Then I dropped a huge part of my stack when some clown called my all-in with an inside straight draw and caught it on the river. Best hand I saw all night, TT, ran straight into AA and I hit the rail.

I'm sure it's just luck of the draw, but it always leaves a sour taste in my mouth when I go to a new site and come away feeling like I've been abused. I don't know if it's worth my time to go back.